Sevco Fans & Scottish Football’s Twisted Priorities

Today has been another strange one for those of us who are keen observers of Scottish football.

First comes the fallout from the appalling way The Herald has treated its number one sports journalist, Graham Spiers, in making an apology, in his name, for an article he wrote on Sevco.

I’ve covered the story over on Fields and it’s a sordid tale alright, and a depressing one for those of us who still believe in the importance of our media.

You can read it at the bottom of the page, if you want to check it out.

The position he’s been put in is so alarming that one of his former colleagues at The Herald has blogged on the subject, to say that in more than four decades at the sharp end of journalism he has never seen a more obvious example of a newspaper failing to back one of its writers, and that says it all.

The indictment is damning.

This is the latest in a long list of times when Sevco fans and the club have harassed journalists and publications to the point where they’ve simply quit and folded the hand. It would be scary if it wasn’t so ridiculous. We really do have a weak, spineless, media class in this country.

Whenever Sevco speaks, these people listen.

Whenever Sevco makes anger or disapproval clear these people crawl under the bed.

Today the club gets set to take a Hearts midfielder, Billy King, on loan.

To those of who expected a ruse like this, it looks obvious; it is their way out of having to keep their promises to the support over big name signings.

O’Halloran isn’t coming – despite weeks of constant media pressure to get St Johnstone to accept a pittance, culminating in a scandalous mock up picture of him a Sevco shirt which appeared on an official SPFL website; the constant pandering to them is a disgrace – but a loanee is.

Under normal circumstances, I would have been astounded if many of the Sevco fans were swallowing it.

Today I knew they would be, and they are, and the reason they’re so willing to ignore the truth, that this reveals their chairman and his board to be comprised of guys for whom truth is an alien concept, is the name of the player.

Their forums are ecstatic.

They can’t believe their luck.

Some of them actually think this gives them license to sing The Billy Boys without fear of legal consequences. That this is indicative of the thinking shows how bizarre the reality in which some of them live has become.

This is how cheaply they are bought off, how easily they are distracted from the glaring inadequacies of their board of directors and huge gaps between the fantasy they are constantly fed and the reality they live with.

They do this to themselves too.

They are their own worst enemies, because they are so busy focussed on what people think and say about them that their club continues to rot from the inside.

Even as this is going on, some amongst their support continue to look outside the club for “enemies”, trawling newspapers and twitter feeds for any comments they don’t like, and more of them are harassing journalists to comment on stories that most people couldn’t give a damn about.

Funny, isn’t it, how they are all for “journalism” as long as it’s saying what they want to hear, right?

This isn’t double standards as much as it’s doublethink, the Orwellian concept of being able to hold two flatly contradictory ideas in your head at the same time and not even consider them different.

As all this is going on, we have Alan Brazil, telling us that “the good of Scottish football” depends on Sevco getting promoted this year … another in a long line of people with some connection to Celtic who simply can’t get past the concept of our club intrinsically tied to one from Ibrox.

I understand it to an extent; some of these people don’t have to live here, don’t have to put up with this day after day, don’t have to read the newspapers up here and see how they act towards even their own employees when they go against the “establishment club.”

Those of us who do have to endure it are pretty clear on how we feel.

This is a club with twisted priorities that now seems to subsist on a daily diet of hate and anger. This is a club who’s directors are clearly unfit to be on the board of any organisation which believes itself a social institution. This is a club who’s official line is that they are a continuation of one that lied, cheated, stole and defrauded millions of pounds … for which they’ve offered no apology or even the slightest modicum of regret. This is a club which is still seeped in sectarianism and bile.

Court cases in relation to their former board are ongoing. The governing body is investigating their fans for sectarian singing. Police Scotland is looking into the threatening nature of one of their fan websites. Their supporters and the club itself are hounding journalists for writing the truth. The press continues to heap praise on their chairman, a man a judge once called a “glib and shameless liar”, and who takes them for absolute mugs. Their manager doesn’t think the rules ought to apply to his team and without soft loans from dodgy geezers and their own directors they’d be trading whilst insolvent … and are still telling the world they’ll spend millions on players.

Is this a football club or an “ongoing criminal enterprise”?

This is something Celtic needs?

This is something Scottish football needs?

What’s wrong with this picture?

In what world do these people really live?

To read Spiers “Apology” Heralds In Dark Days For Scottish Journalism click here